Our Idiot Brother ticks all the boxes as far as studio-indie comedies go, whose crossover appeal seems to be the work of a dedicated focus group. Dysfunctional family! Popular comedic actor in lead role, sporting a beard and Cosby sweater! Zooey Deschanel and cast members of Parks & Recreation and The Office in supporting roles! Adorable moppet kid who drops f-bombs! Sentimental subplot involving an equally adorable golden retriever! Nonstop wistful indie-folk over the soundtrack! Numerous emotional predicaments solved by montages accompanied to aforementioned music! Meet-cute final scene!
Fortunately, the indomitable Paul Rudd is in the lead, as the titular sibling who turns his sisters’ lives upside-down after serving a 9-month prison stint for selling weed to a uniformed police officer. Rudd’s combination of bland handsomeness, likeable goofiness and discordant comic timing has constantly made him one today’s most welcome screen presences, and he singlehandedly masks some of the film’s most glaring shortcomings; namely that the film’s central irony – that such a loveable goof has the ability to bring out the worst in everyone around him – is all but repeatedly printed on intertitles.
Indeed, Our Idiot Brother amounts to little more than a feature-length sitcom episode, but on a scene-by-scene basis, it’s constantly amiable, mostly due to Rudd’s inventive delivery and alchemic ability to the revitalise even the most stale scenarios. He’s helped in no small part by the equally appealing (and uniformly attractive) supporting cast – Deschanel, Elizabeth Banks and Emily Mortimer as the sisters, as well as Rashida Jones, Adam Scott, Steve Coogan and many others. As an in-flight movie, it’s probably a masterpiece.
Aussie film Burning Man opens with a closeup of its protagonist’s buttocks shaking as he masturbates. It’s an unflattering image to begin any film on, let alone one with obvious aspirations towards Art – it all but announces the film to follow as being a big wank. And surely enough, writer/director Jonathan Teplinzky delivers on this promise. Jumping back and forth through time to evoke the haphazard memory recollection of Tom (unevenly played by Matthew Goode), in a life-flashing-before-his-eyes moment as he lies fatally wounded in his upturned car after collision, Burning Man resembles less a memoir than a generic disease-of-the-week weepie edited with a chainsaw.
The film’s fatal flaw is that neither the fragmented, non-linear construction nor the scenes themselves evoke memories, or the process of remembering. Much of the early scenes involve Tom engaged in Xtreme cooking at his chic Bondi restaurant workplace, or sex with a variety of women, and Lepitzky teases us with details about the mysteries of Tom’s situation before eventually revealing all. But this narrative sleight-of-hand is at odds with the recreation of his subjectivity, turning what should be an emotional experience into a sterile puzzle-film. The freely associative editing likewise tends toward the prosaic; a scene involving a breast cancer examination intercut with the same woman’s breasts being fondled during sex in pervy closeup is a sure sign you’re not watching a masterpiece.
A slickly and aggressively bombastic, non-intimate visual style doesn’t help, and after a while the film starts to resemble what Michael Bay’s take on Tree of Life might’ve looked like – which makes it sound more interesting that it actually is. ‘Seize the day’, sez Burning Man once its pieces fall into place; i.e. don’t watch it.
We Need To Talk About Kevin is being sold as a worthy prestige pic; an Oscar vehicle for Tilda Swinton that takes a sobering look at guilt and tragedy within a family. It certainly is these things, but Lynne Ramsay’s adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s bestseller is best approached as belonging to that most unworthy of genres; ie, the horror film. On those terms, it’s a stunning piece of cinema; a harrowing immersion into primal, subjective emotional states, where simplistic characterisations and the whiff of exploitation – that would sink a more naturalistic take on the subject – here emerge as resounding strengths.
Swinton’s Eva is the core of the film, and it traces the psychological warfare between her and her spawn-of-Satan son, culminating in him committing a high-school massacre. If that description of his character sounds glib, it’s only because that’s how he’s written and acted by Ezra Miller – a dead-eyed androgyne straight out of the Larry Clark/Gus Van Sant filmography. But a nuanced characterisation isn’t what’s required here; what Ramsay is going for is a kaleidoscopic representation of Eva’s fractured psyche, jumping back-and-forth in time with remarkable fluidity, capturing her motherhood as a prolonged nightmare.
Again cementing her position as modern cinema’s reigning arthouse superstar, Swinton is a force, her face constantly and palpably registering the title’s unspoken demand. But this is Lynne Ramsay’s show all the way; in lesser hands, this could’ve been boilerplate stuff. But her uniquely slippery style, carried over from her 1999 debut Ratcatcher and 2002 follow-up Morvern Callar – perched somewhere between Kubrick’s precision and compositional rigor, and Claire Denis’ eye for ephemeral, allusive details – it all feels completely and utterly wrenched from the subconscious, and bleeding onscreen.
In Jafar Panahi’s 1997 film The Mirror, the young lead actress decides, mid-scene, that she doesn’t want to act any longer, and takes her headscarf off before running home. All of a sudden, the fictional film we’ve been watching opens up into a non-fictional one, documenting Panahi and his crew searching for her in the busy Tehran streets. This spontaneous, offscreen drama, as Panahi implicitly argues, is more revealing and valuable than the fictional thread; the young girl’s removal of her orthodox dress code functioning as a metaphor for a broader, collective frustration with Iran’s repressive, totalitarian regime.
For This Is Not a Film – which makes memorable use of footage from the aforementioned film – Panahi was presented with a higher hurdle to jump; depressingly, he received a 6-year jail sentence for making anti-regime films, and an additional 20-year filmmaking ban. This ‘effort’ (as Panahi and co-director Mojbata Mirtahmasb slyly credit it) was Panahi’s response to his incrimination, shot within the confines of his apartment under house arrest, as he waits for the response to his appeal. Despite the title and mode of production (shot on video, smuggled out in USB in a cake), it’s as much a film as any of Godard’s cine-essays, or even Paranormal Activity. And given the circumstances surrounding its making, the latter might as well be an alternate title.
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